|
When therefore we name beauty, all such shape must be
dismissed; nothing visible is to be conceived, or at once we
descend from beauty to what but bears the name in virtue of some
faint participation. This formless Form is beautiful as Form,
beautiful in proportion as we strip away all shape even that
given in thought to mark difference, as for instance the
difference between Justice and Sophrosyne, beautiful in their
difference.
The Intellectual-Principle is the less for seeing things as
distinct even in its act of grasping in unity the multiple
content of its Intellectual realm; in its knowing of the
particular it possesses itself of one Intellectual shape; but,
even thus, in this dealing with variety as unity, it leaves us
still with the question how we are to envisage that which stands
beyond this all-lovely, beyond this principle at once multiple
and above multiplicity, the Supreme for which the soul hungers
though unable to tell why such a being should stir its
longing-reason, however, urging that This at last is the
Authentic Term because the Nature best and most to be loved may
be found there only where there is no least touch of Form. Bring
something under Form and present it so before the mind;
immediately we ask what Beyond imposed that shape; reason answers
that while there exists the giver having shape to give- a giver
that is shape, idea, an entirely measured thing- yet this is not
alone, is not adequate in itself, is not beautiful in its own
right but is a mingled thing. Shape and idea and measure will
always be beautiful, but the Authentic Beauty and the
Beyond-Beauty cannot be under measure and therefore cannot have
admitted shape or be Idea: the primal existent, The First, must
be without Form; the beauty in it must be, simply, the Nature of
the Intellectual Good.
Take an example from love: so long as the attention is upon the
visible form, love has not entered: when from that outward form
the lover elaborates within himself, in his own partless soul, an
immaterial image, then it is that love is born, then the lover
longs for the sight of the beloved to make that fading image live
again. If he could but learn to look elsewhere, to the more
nearly formless, his longing would be for that: his first
experience was loving a great luminary by way of some thin gleam
from it.
Shape is an impress from the unshaped; it is the unshaped that
produces shape, not shape the unshaped; and Matter is needed for
the producing; Matter, in the nature of things, is the furthest
away, since of itself it has not even the lowest degree of shape.
Thus lovableness does not belong to Matter but to that which
draws upon Form: the Form upon Matter comes by way of soul; soul
is more nearly Form and therefore more lovable;
Intellectual-Principle, nearer still, is even more to be loved:
by these steps we are led to know that the First Principle,
principle of Beauty, must be formless.
|
|